Blood flow in cerebral arteries – automated way from Computed Tomography to ANSYS Fluent

With the constant growth of computer simulation significance in science and engi-neering, many new fields are gaining access to these powerful tools. One of these new disciplines is medicine. Human body provides many fascinating areas that could be researched from completely different angle and could gain all the benefits that computer simulation offers. For example blood flow in human arteries can be stud-ied using Computational Fluid Dynamics. Researchers of cerebrovascular disorders can get an insight view on physical phenomena of blood flow and study risk factors of embolism or cerebral aneurysm. Main issue in using computer simulation in medical research is the complexity and uniqueness of geometry that needs to be handled. After all, human body is one of the most sophisticated engineering systems created by nature. In this paper, a workflow for creating a numerical mesh for CFD simulation purposes is shown. Application shown in the example focus on cerebral arteries blood flow simulation. Numerical mesh is generated based on CT scan of patient’s head, using freeware tools Slicer3D and AutoIt3 as well as commercial software ANSYS Fluent Meshing 15.0.